Peter Yates: a filmmaker of grace

The British director of the 1969 thriller 'Bullitt' will sadly not be
remembered for the right reasons, says David Gritten.

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Peter Yates created one of film's most memorable action sequences, the much-imitated car chase in the 1968 police thriller BullittPhoto: Corbis

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Peter Yates and Steve McQueen on the set of 'Bullitt'Photo: CORBIS

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Nail-biting: Steve McQueen in Peter Yates' Bullitt, 1968Photo: PA

By David Gritten

6:05PM GMT 10 Jan 2011

Given the modern tendency to reduce the lives of film-makers to a single brief TV-friendly clip, I suppose it’s inevitable that British director Peter Yates will be remembered best for Bullitt - the thriller starring Steve McQueen that included one of cinema’s most nail-biting car chases.

No surprise there – it’s hard to find a fault in that sequence, in which Yates orchestrated cars bouncing at high speed down the vertiginous hills of San Francisco’s streets.

Yet Bullitt (1968) as a whole was by no means the best work of Yates, who has died at the age of 81. I prefer to remember him for two later and very different films, on which he stamped his indelible mark.

Breaking Away (1979) was a gentle, smart, rueful comedy set in Middle America (Bloomington, Indiana, to be precise). It starred Dennis Christopher as a teenage boy about to graduate from high school who was curiously enamoured of all things Italian – especially Italian cycling hotshots. He took his enthusiasm so far that he began speaking Italian at home, to the surprise of his sympathetic mother (Barbara Barrie) and his irascible all-American car dealer father (Paul Rooney.)

No-one will ever rate Breaking Away as an all-time classic, but it’s a delightful, touching film whose director handled it with care and delicacy. Yates coaxed excellent performances from his actors, and Barrie was rewarded with an Oscar nomination.

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Four years later, Yates’s film The Dresser, was even more of an awards contender. Adapted from the play by Ronald Harwood, it starred Albert Finney as a flamboyant, imperious actor-manager of the old school, with Tom Courtenay cast as his nagging gay dresser. (Harwood’s play was effectively a memoir of his time employed as a dresser by Sir Donald Wolfit.) Finney and Courtenay were in blistering form, and their two-handed scenes, illustrating the subtle balance of power between them, are memorable. They both received Oscar nominations - as did Yates, Harwood and the film itself.

What this proved above all else was Yates’s skill with actors. On that subject, I’d also find a cherished place in his canon for The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). It starred Robert Mitchum, one of my very favourite screen actors, as a small-time gangster and police informant. Mitchum’s pretty good in it, and by 1973, almost no other director could elicit a decent performance out of Mitchum.

I first met Yates, a hospitable, affable man, on the set of The Year of the Comet (1992). A genial romantic comedy caper, it fizzled at the box office. As the 20th century came to a close, it became increasingly tough for Yates to find work as a feature film director.

He switched to directing TV mini-series, as did his contemporaries John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin and Paul Mazursky. In 2000, Yates agreed to direct a TV adaptation of Don Quixote for TNT. (Not an easy story to film – just ask Terry Gilliam.) He did a creditable job, with John Lithgow as his Quixote and Bob Hoskins as Sancho Panza. But after another TV movie in 2004, Yates’s directing career ended.

In his 40 year career (it began with the Cliff Richard musical Summer Holiday), he steadfastly refused to tie himself down to a particular genre. Between career highlights, he made films as varied as Murphy’s War (1971), The Deep (1977), Eleni (1985) and The House on Carroll Street (1988). As Yates once told me, this genre-hopping was deliberate.

“After Bullitt, I was determined not to do another action film,” he recalled. “That may have been a mistake, but my theory was, perhaps selfishly, it’s much more interesting to be involved with different kinds of genres. If you’re just one kind of director, people will get tired of you. But if you make different films all the time, hopefully you’ll be judged on talent.”

Because he perceived that the range of available Hollywood studio films was narrowing, and because he had no interest in teenage comedies or special effects movies, Yates left Los Angeles some 12 years ago and returned to his native England, where he was based when he made his last two mini-series for TV. He might have made a bigger name for himself had he stuck to action-thrillers, but his work was marked by a grace and expertise that never spilled over into flashy self-regard.